Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus such as a multifunctional digital image forming apparatus (i.e., a multi-function peripheral abbreviated as MFP) having various functions, e.g., printer function, facsimile function, and scanner function, a shared address book display control method for the image processing apparatus, and a recording medium.
Description of the Related Art
The following description sets forth the inventor's knowledge of related art and problems therein and should not be construed as an admission of knowledge in the prior art.
A portable terminal apparatus having communication function, such as a smartphone and a tablet computer, usually comes equipped with an address book. This address book stores contact data including registered names (contact names) and addresses, for example e-mail addresses, of users who have connections with the owner user of the portable terminal apparatus.
There is a recent technique for a MFP as mentioned above to collect contact data from address books of portable terminal apparatuses and make use of the collected contact data in address settings for data transmission. Also, there is a common technique for such a MFP to register contact data, which is collected from portable terminal apparatuses of users, to a shared address book that is jointly owned by multiple users. This will meet the needs when they wish to share and freely access specific contacts such as clients and cooperative business sections.
Since such a shared address book contains contact data from personal address books created by different users, it may have contacts with different contact names but with identical e-mail addresses. For example, User 1 may have registered in his/her address book a contact with the contact name “Mr. Sato” and the e-mail address sato@xxx.com, User 2 may have registered in his/her address book a contact with the contact name “Taro Sato” and the e-mail address “sato@xxx.com”, and User 3 may have registered in his/her address book a contact with the contact name “Client Mr. Sato” and the e-mail address “sato@xxx.com”. In this case, after the MFP collects these contacts and registers to the shared address book, the shared address book results in containing contacts with different contact names but with identical e-mail addresses (the same user). It will be confusing to a user trying to make a choice from a contact list.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2011-216097 discloses a technique that ensures proper mail data delivery by setting a new e-mail address instead of an old e-mail address when the address of a recipient has been changed. Specifically, the new and old e-mail addresses are registered to an address book in association with each other, and when a user creates mail data, an e-mail address set in the mail data is compared to the old e-mail addresses registered in the address book. If the e-mail address set in the mail data is identical with any of the old e-mail addresses, it is replaced with the new e-mail address registered in the same record in the address book. So, in other words, the technique ensures proper mail data delivery while the user does not need to be bothered by checking every e-mail address if it has been changed and rewriting an old e-mail address with a new e-mail address.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2011-216097 discloses a technique of setting a new e-mail address instead of an old e-mail address when the address of a recipient has been changed, which does not bring a solution to the outstanding problem. That is, a MFP simply collects contact data from address books of portable terminal apparatuses of users and registers the collected data to a shared address book, and thus the shared address book can possibly result in containing contacts with different contact names but with identical e-mail addresses (the same user). If it actually results in that, it still will be confusing to a user trying to make a choice from a contact list.